Sunday, December 24, 2017

The dead and the naked

Episodic double murders are always a candidate for glory at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network, but what makes some episodic double murders more Foxalicious than others? This one, for example, started Sunday morning at the No. 4 position, with "Killed By A Monster" at the top of the page. Let's have a look at Fox works to shape the raw material into the perfect story for its readers.

First, the headline -- fine as far as it goes, but nothing there that would set this apart from any other set of murders on Christmas Eve. "Workplace violence" doesn't elevate matters; you can't bend it far enough to make contact with the Two Minutes Hate angle. And there's nothing very exciting about the art: basically a mug shot of some post boxes. Hard to believe a Fox staffer missed the obvious angle that perked things up around 10:30 a.m.:

Relatives and friends of two Ohio postal workers slain by an enraged,
naked coworker were at a loss to explain the violence that occurred
Saturday morning.

So we've managed to get "naked" into the hed, but -- Sweet Norman Mailer, who's naked and who's dead? The original hed (and the url) are the usual way we -- well, certainly we headline writers -- think of "X's slaying": "the slaying of X." We'd need another prepositional phrase to get "X's slaying of two colleagues" out of it, and when the verb becomes singular, matters get even messier.

Still, the commenters have picked up on something else that slipped past the Fox editors:

DeShaune is it? Uh-huh.

So about 11:39, the next angle falls into place:

The headline is the same syntactic hash, but now it's a real Fox story. Right, commenters?His mama says he is a good boy...on his way to college, after church services are over.More mental illness from the black community..the Ball family is a good exampleEver wonder why there are NO 'successful' black run nations or cities? How does a guy like that even get hired by the USPS? Oh, probably affirmative action!

The post office needs to re-think it's diversity program were it hires people just to check it's racial block!13% of the population, 75% of the problems.

The
story slides up a notch after the headline finally falls into place,
because at that point, why bother with the text at all?

The comments, as usual, are much more illuminating -- for example, in case you thought Fox readers were all still enraged at the loss of manufacturing jobs to Mexico or something. See if you can pick up a familiar theme here:

If Obammy had a son.......

If Obama had a son, this would be his choice.

If Obama had a postal son. Oh wait he has had a lot of them.

If OBama had a son...

If i had a son, he would look like DeShaune.

If Obama had a son, he would look just like DeShaune Stewart.

He was a gentle giant.

Postmaster probably told him eating skittles all day on the job wasn't acceptable

But even though it's a Sunday, Fox readers remember what they're told on the radio Monday through Friday:Anyone else notice the resemblance of this guy to Maxine Watters?

An extra 400 bucks in his paycheck. This was so predictable.---SchumerI don't think this means that everyone who watches or reads or listens to Fox is a drooling racist. I don't even think it means that everyone who works for Fox is a drooling racist. Sure, there's no mug shot of the alleged neo-Nazi teen who is accused of killing the white couple in the lead story, but if the cops have declined to identify and provide a picture of a 17-year-old accused of a major crime, that's probably cause to celebrate. And clearly there's some political learning going on; Fox readers have learned to associate bad things with people who vote against the wishes of their orange monkey-king, so they're a step closer to making rational choices that reflect their own perceived interests. Why they think that's going to create coal jobs, I don't know, but I guess it's a start.

I do think that if you're riding the Fox elevator each morning to begin your daily news diet, you might want to look around at your fellow passengers every now and then. Do you really want to be trapped with these people when the power goes out?